A supply closet as an office? For employees who are responsible for the computing capabilities of an entire company? Shame on them.

Alas, the piece wasn’t about corporate coups d’etat (it’s a little far-fetched, I concede), but it did highlight the pressing issues help desks are facing today, in this sorta-kinda-post-recession era. Namely…

1. Efficiency

The piece’s author, Cara Garretson, mentions improvements that would make help desks more efficient, such as a central knowledgebase, remote control capabilities, and a database of standard responses to common problems. The problem, says Garretson, is that those improvements cost employee hours.

They don’t have to.

There are companies out there, outsourcers or “best-of-breed” service providers like us, who specialize in efficiency. They are experienced with providing remote desktop support, and maintain extensive knowledgebases that  include ample information about common software problems. Best of all, when you hire them, you don’t pay all the ancillary costs of having a hulking, certified IT department – you pay only for what you need.

2. Appreciation, Understanding, Alignment

Garretson also mentions the disconnect between IT and the rest of the business and its effect on how well the help desk can operate. One of her sources laments that his department is not fully appreciated by the rest of the company, and that his previous office was actually a supply closet.

A supply closet as an office? For employees who are responsible for the computing capabilities of an entire company? Shame on them.

This misalignment is a holdover from a different era, when IT’s job was to fix things that broke or caught fire. Plus, IT historically hasn’t been seen as a proactive bunch, at least not by the corporate population in general.

When the help desk gains the budget funds, loses the attitude, and actually begins to help people get their jobs done — that’s when its reputation will undergo a renaissance.

3. Full-Timers, Temps, Outsourcers – Oh My!

I agree with the writer’s assertion that piecing together a department with a mix of full-timers and temps isn’t a long-term strategy. But I also believe that it’s impossible to staff a department with techs who are expert in every application a company uses.

I’ve written a few posts on this issue and have included a breakdown of just how much money a company “saves” using each. (Click here to read the full posts.) Here’s a sampling:

Most temps are generalists who cannot support advanced issues like macros and application development. They can support only 18 applications on average. And while they may seem cheaper than full-timers, you’re still paying them a fixed rate plus overhead. That amounts to an average of $43,000 annually.

Factor in the temp response time (6 minutes), the whopping abandonment rate (10 percent), eternal peak hold time (15 minutes), and the troubling amount of time it takes to resolve an issue (45 minutes on average) and the savings disappear.

With full-time employees, the numbers are not much better.

4. Quality of Service

If a CIO expects quality from a deep-discounted, all-in-one outsourcer whose techs’ main goal is to get the person OFF the phone, then that’s just bad business. Likewise, overloading existing IT staff with too much work will only decrease quality.

Although much can be said about each of the points individually, they do not operate independently. The help desk’s quality of service is directly tied to its perception by the rest of the company, and its perception and efficiency affect how big a budget it receives. Everything is related.

Maybe a coup is needed after all.

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They are conditioned to expect terrible service from their IT department. That’s truly sad.

And although his anecdote is about the business-to-consumer market, it could just as easily be used to illustrate the state of customer service within companies.

This company, PC Helps Support, is an outsourced software support provider, so we’re chin-deep in issues surrounding customer service on a regular basis. When a firm partners with us, our consultants become part of their help desk.

One of the most surprising — and troubling — things I have seen in my time here is how taken aback callers are when a real person (one of our consultants) answers the phone and doesn’t put them on hold. And when we solve an issue within one call, it blows them away.

They are conditioned to expect terrible service from their IT department. That’s truly sad.

One point in Snyder’s piece that resonated with me was about lingo. Indeed, the lingo needs to go. I wrote a few blog posts on this subject, and in one in particular, I noted how the recession has made IT/business alignment that much more important — alienating the rest of your company by speaking in terms no one but programmers can comprehend is not alignment. Understanding how technical tools and practices relate to the business as a whole, now that is.

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“The Ribbon” almost became a profanity in 2009. It’s central to the Office redesign, and it has rendered even seasoned Office users lost and confused.

Are we “efficiency experts”? We think so. Are we “leisure enablers”? Yes, we are. Are we “ROI generators”? Precisely.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Mobile Device Support

I, personally, cannot imagine a world without on-the-go access to e-mail, documents, maps and every other feature my mobile device affords me. And, I suspect, most corporate workers would agree.

And smart phones will only become more central to how we work. According to a 2009 study, mobile use for business will double from 2008 to 2011 and the variety of devices being used will increase. Problem is, IT departments will continue to be ill-equipped to handle the support needs.

A lack of support naturally leads to downtime, and, because the majority of users are higher-profile employees such as senior and middle managers, the downtime will have a greater effect on an organization’s bottom line.

That’s where we come in. Companies hire us to provide 24-7 expert mobile device support – from BlackBerry and Palm to iPhone and Windows Mobile. Downtime is eliminated; productivity is elevated.

2. Office 2007 & Migrations

“The Ribbon” almost became a profanity in 2009. It’s central to the Office redesign, and it has rendered even seasoned Office users lost and confused.

Many companies had already committed to a migration before the economic downturn, and the inevitable learning curve promised grief. Factor in the dismal financial climate and the overwhelming pressure to pull off a successful migration, and you have full-on agita.

That’s where we come in.

Companies hire us to be there, sometimes 24-7, during the all phases of a migration to Office 2007. Our Microsoft-certified consultants handle the surge in calls early on in a migration, and continue throughout all phases.

3. General How-To

This is our foundation. You need help with a VLOOKUP or pivot table? Call us. You have a thousand-recipient mail merge to complete and keep getting errors? We can help.

Our consultants rarely come across a question that hasn’t been asked before. Experience and stats prove that most users have problems with the same general areas of an application. And although modifying font and line spacing in a document isn’t excessively time-consuming, when you add up the minutes it takes to make those types of changes to every document created, and scale that across a company with 3,500 PC users, the productivity loss can be substantial.

Back to our definition. I’d say this: We enable you to go to more of your kids’ soccer games. We help your company earn its return on investment. We help you do more with less, to work efficiently, to get things done.

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How many times have you avoided a problem or simply “made do” because the thought of calling the help desk was just too painful?

Unfinished business renders me uneasy, and one lingering task in particular – calling my VoIP service provider – has been giving me heartburn lately.

I do not want to call because I know I will spend too much time getting nowhere. And I’m speaking from experience.

A few weeks back, I called the company to set up the service. It was a Saturday morning, and I had about an hour to kill before I was set to begin making pumpkin pancakes for guests. Plenty of time to fit in a call. Or so I thought.

The resulting hour-long phone conversation was one of the most painful I have ever experienced. The customer service rep had good intentions (I think), but he just did everything wrong.

In response to that experience, I’ve created this list of guidelines for customer service/help desk staff.

1. Let the customer speak and don’t interrupt. If I have an issue and you do not allow me to explain the nuances, you will not get the whole story, and thus will not be able to help me.
2. Don’t offer empty, scripted promises such as “No need to worry, Ms. Darr. We will have you taken care of in no time.” My perception of time is different from another person’s. “No time” to me is less than 10 minutes.
3. If you and I do not share the same mother tongue, please speak slowly. I promise to do the same. Even if we do speak the same language, go slowly anyway.
4. Don’t assume I know what a V-Portal is or what VoIP stands for — even if I sound tech-savvy. Explain it to me in terms I can understand.
5. If you have to put me on hold, give me an idea of how long it will take. It tells me that you think my time is valuable, at least a little bit. And if it’s going to be a lengthy wait, check in with me periodically so I know you haven’t forgotten about me.

Here’s my point: As of today, I still haven’t made the call. I’ve wasted time and money putting it off. Think about your own experiences: How many times have you avoided a problem or simply “made do” because the thought of calling the help desk was just too painful?

It happens often in business, especially at firms that deem help desk support and customer service to be luxuries. And it’s costing companies heaps of money, and countless hours of lost productivity.

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It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies.

Here are a few numbers from the AARP piece: According to Yellin, Americans contact customer service 143 times per year, or 2 to 3 times per week, on average. The average cost to companies with an American-based call center is about $7.50 per call. Outsourcing to another country knocks the price down to $2.35 per call, and letting customers take care of the issue themselves through an automated system drops it to about 32 cents per call.

The AARP reporter asked Yellin about the declining quality of customer service. Here’s her response: “What has happened increasingly, especially in the last five years, is that many companies haven’t paid attention to customer service and continue to view the success of a call center from their own viewpoint — as a cost whose success is based on the number of calls they can handle in an hour.”

Bingo. Just because a outsourcer can take thousands of calls a month at a bargain price doesn’t mean they can actually resolve issues. Bye-bye company cost savings, hello customer (and employee) rage.

This is where the new technology comes in. In the past, miffed customers had few outlets for their rage. Today, they have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a horde of sites that encourage commenting and reviews. A company can only ignore criticism for so long.

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Quality customer service isn’t just a nicety or something you’d find in Charleston; it’s critical to the health of a business.

Here’s a sample:

“You were awesome and this follow-up e-mail speaks volumes of how wonderful your service was.”

And another:

“I was absolutely thrilled when I got an e-mail from [the consultant] the next day with tutorials. I thought that was amazing customer service. Customer service is dead these days. Your company renewed my faith in it.”

It’s standard practice here to send customers reinforcement learning tips and e-mails with topics that are related to the software issue that prompted them to call in the first place. Glass-half-empties may say it’s overkill, or that it’s akin to spamming.

With an attitude like that, no wonder customer service is dead.

In this business — outsourced software support — quality customer service isn’t just a nicety or something you’d find in Charleston; it’s critical to the health of a business. Having a measurement method in place is even more important.

A quote from an InformationWeek report that was published in June says it perfectly: “IT service assurance is something you build in to ensure that your organization’s massive IT investment is doing what business leaders want it to do.”

We couldn’t agree more. It’s a fact that if customers are treated poorly, they will hesitate to call back the next time they have an issue. Instead, they’ll ask a colleague for help and waste the time of two employees, devise clumsy workarounds, or do nothing at all. Morale will suffer too.

But if a customer is given the attention they deserve, even if it’s only for 10 minutes, they will emerge with more knowledge and a better attitude. That, in the end, isn’t a luxury; it’s good business.

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